Prelims

Half Title

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy

Series Page

Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Series Editor: Michael Lounsbury

Recent Volumes:

Series Page

RESEARCH IN THE SOCIOLOGY OF ORGANIZATIONS ADVISORY BOARD

Series Editor

Michael Lounsbury

Professor of Strategic Management & Organization

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Alberta School of Business

RSO Advisory Board

Howard E. Aldrich, University of North Carolina, USA

Shaz Ansari, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

Silvia Dorado Banacloche, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

Christine Beckman, University of Southern California, USA

Marya Besharov, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

Eva Boxenbaum, Copenhagen Business School, DENMARK

Ed Carberry, University of Massachusetts Boston, USA

Lisa Cohen, McGill University, CANADA

Jeannette Colyvas, Northwestern University, USA

Erica Coslor, University of Melbourne, AUSTRALIA

Gerald F. Davis, University of Michigan, USA

Rich Dejordy, California State University, USA

Rodolphe Durand, HEC Paris, FRANCE

Fabrizio Ferraro, IESE Business School, SPAIN

Peer Fiss, University of Southern California, USA

Mary Ann Glynn, Boston College, USA

Nina Granqvist, Aalto University School of Business, FINLAND

Royston Greenwood, University of Alberta, CANADA

Stine Grodal, Northeastern University, USA

Markus A. Hoellerer, University of New South Wales, AUSTRALIA

Ruthanne Huising, emlyon business school, FRANCE

Candace Jones, University of Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM

Sarah Kaplan, University of Toronto, CANADA

Brayden G. King, Northwestern University, USA

Matthew S. Kraatz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Tom Lawrence, Oxford University, UNITED KINGDOM

Xiaowei Rose Luo, Insead, FRANCE

Johanna Mair, Hertie School, GERMANY

Christopher Marquis, Cornell University, USA

Renate Meyer, Vienna University, AUSTRIA

William Ocasio, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Nelson Phillips, Imperial College London, UNITED KINGDOM

Prateek Raj, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, INDIA

Marc Schneiberg, Reed College, USA

Marc-David Seidel, University of British Columbia, CANADA

Paul Spee, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

Paul Tracey, Cambridge University, UNITED KINGDOM

Kerstin Sahlin, Uppsala University, SWEDEN

Sarah Soule, Stanford University, USA

Eero Vaara, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

Marc Ventresca, University of Oxford, UNITED KINGDOM

Maxim Voronov, York University, CANADA

Filippo Carlo Wezel USI Lugano, SWITZERLAND

Melissa Wooten, Rutgers University, USA

April Wright, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA

Meng Zhao, Nanyang Business School & Renmin University, CHINA

Enying Zheng, Peking University, CHINA

Tammar B. Zilber, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, ISRAEL

Title Page

Research in the Sociology of Organizations  Volume 72

Organizational Imaginaries: Tempering Capitalism and Tending to Communities through Cooperatives and Collectivist Democracy

Edited by

Katherine K. Chen

The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY, USA

And

Victor Tan Chen

Virginia Commonwealth University, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

Reprints and permissions service

Contact: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83867-990-3 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-989-7 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83867-991-0 (Epub)

ISSN: 0733-558X (Series)

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Dedication

This volume is dedicated to Joyce Rothschild and other scholars who have persisted in researching, teaching, and mentoring about the multiplicity of organizing possibilities.

Contents

List of Figures

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

List of Tables

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

About the Contributors

Katherine K. Chen is an associate professor of sociology at The City College of New York and Graduate Center, CUNY; she is an organizational ethnographer who specializes in studying prefigurative and other voluntary organizations that create communities. Her publications include the award-winning Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization Behind the Burning Man Event (University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Victor Tan Chen is an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He is the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy (University of California Press, 2015) and (with Katherine Newman) The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near Poor in America (Beacon Press, 2007), named by Library Journal as one of the Best Business Books of 2007. He received the 2017 Dunlop Outstanding Scholar Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association. His work has been featured in the Atlantic, BBC News, the New York Times, and NPR. He also edits In The Fray, an award-winning magazine devoted to personal stories on global issues.

Thibault Daudigeos is a professor of organization studies at Grenoble École de Management. His research interests focus on the responsibilities of the modern corporation to serve the common good and on alternative organizations that foster social and environmental innovations. He is the head of the research chair Inclusive Sustainability: Territorial Ecosystems in Transition and launched the grande école third-year specialization Innovation for Transition. He was co-editor-in-chief of M@n@gement from 2017 to 2020.

Leanne Hedberg recently completed her PhD in business administration at the University of Alberta, specializing in strategic management and organization. Prior to earning her PhD, she was an executive leader of for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Her research focuses on how organizations can contribute to the realization of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals through social enterprises, social innovations, and cross-sector or multi-stakeholder collaborations. She has a particular interest in the development of sustainable food systems. Her work has been accepted for publication in Organization Science and has been published in Human Resource Management Review. She has also published numerous business cases on sustainability.

Stéphane Jaumier is an associate professor of management control at Grenoble École de Management. His research interests include questions of organizational democracy and, more generally, those of power, control, and resistance within alternative organizations. He focuses in particular on worker cooperatives, to which he applies perspectives and methods drawn from anthropology. He currently heads the Alternative Forms of Markets and Organizations research group.

Seon Mi Kim is an associate professor of social work at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on social and solidarity economic approaches for low-income minority women and communities, including cooperatives, social enterprises, and alternative community economic development movements. Recent projects explore how the management strategies of cooperatives and labor unions affect the job quality of minority female home care workers. She previously worked on issues of women’s empowerment and democracy as a policy director at Korea Women’s Associations United for 10 years. She is also the founder of UC Smiles, a local currency movement agency in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.

Christa R. Lee-Chuvala is an assistant professor of social sector leadership in the College of Business and Leadership at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, where she teaches a range of courses on organizational leadership and development, economics, and data analysis. She studies urban economic development, focusing on the ways in which inequality and poverty manifest across different dimensions, including spatially and organizationally. Prior to academia, she worked in community development and international development. She holds a master’s degree from Harvard and a PhD in urban and regional studies from MIT.

James M. Mandiberg is an associate professor and chair of the Organizational Management and Leadership Program at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, City University of New York. His primary research is on social enterprise and social innovation that engages highly stigmatized and excluded populations through identity-community economic development. Prior to his current position, he was on the faculty at two Japanese universities, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Columbia University, and held several executive management positions in social services. His doctoral training was jointly in organizational psychology and organizational sociology at the University of Michigan.

M. Paola Ometto is an assistant professor of management at California State University San Marcos. She earned a PhD in business administration at the University of Alberta, specializing in strategic management and organization. She also received a PhD in public administration from EAESP-FGV (Getulio Vargas Foundation’s Sao Paulo School of Business Administration). Her research interests are social movements, social enterprises, communities, and institutional theory. Her work has been published in the journals Business & Society, Organização & Sociedade, and Idéias.

Sanjay Pinto is a US-based researcher and writer studying sexual and racial harassment in the workplace, the politics of solidarity, models for expanding worker ownership and control, and labor organizing using digital tools. He is a fellow at the Worker Institute at Cornell and the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations and consults with the training and employment funds of the healthcare union 1199SEIU and different philanthropic organizations. He has a PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University and an MSc in development studies from the London School of Economics.

Jonathan Preminger is a lecturer at Cardiff Business School, UK, and author of Labor in Israel: Beyond Nationalism and Neoliberalism (Cornell University Press, 2018). His research encompasses industrial relations, employee ownership, and the sociology of work, where he focuses on collective voice, inclusion, participation, and citizenship.

Joyce Rothschild is professor emerita at Virginia Tech, having served as a professor in the university’s Department of Sociology and School of Public and International Affairs for 27 years. Her research projects have had several empirical foci – from worker cooperatives to whistle blowers – while her writing has returned frequently to the question of how organizations can accomplish their purposes without hierarchical control. Overall, her work develops a collectivist-democratic alternative to bureaucracy – that is, a form of organization that effectively offers voice and agency to all of its members. Her book with J. Allen Whitt, The Cooperative Workplace: Potentials and Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy and Participation (Cambridge University Press, 1986), won the C. Wright Mills Book Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

Marc Schneiberg is the John C. Pock Professor of Sociology at Reed College. He is an economic and organizational sociologist whose research focuses mainly on the rise, contemporary fates, and economic consequences of organizational diversity and alternatives to giant shareholder corporations in American capitalism. This work first addresses the evolution of cooperative and other alternative enterprise systems in the United States, including electrical and agricultural cooperatives, insurance mutuals, community banks, and credit unions. It also addresses how such systems can help reshape markets, subject corporations to countervailing forces, and foster both resilience and more broadly shared prosperity in local economies. He also studies institutions, their relationships with social movements, and economic governance, including association, regulation, and self-regulation in American manufacturing and finance. He has served on the executive council of the American Sociological Association, currently serves on the executive council of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, and has twice received National Science Foundation support for his work. His research has appeared in Politics and Society, the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Organizational Studies, Socio-Economic Review, the Seattle University Law Review, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. He received his BA from Haverford College and his PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Katherine Sobering is an assistant professor of sociology and faculty affiliate in women’s and gender studies at the University of North Texas. She is an ethnographer who studies how inequality is produced and disrupted in the United States and Latin America. With Javier Auyero, she is the author of The Ambivalent State (Oxford, 2019). Her work has also been published in Work and Occupations, Qualitative Sociology, and other academic journals. She is currently writing a book on worker-recuperated businesses in Argentina.

Jason Spicer is an assistant professor of economic development and planning at the University of Toronto. He researches organizational alternatives to mainstream economic practices, with a focus on the role that politics, planning, and policy play in constraining or enabling the viability of such efforts at different spatial and operational scales. He holds a master’s degree and a PhD from MIT. His research has appeared in outlets such as Socio-Economic Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy, and Society, and has been featured in the Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, and Foreign Policy.

Carla Young earned her PhD in sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is a researcher at the Institute for Ecological Economy Research in Berlin. She studies how people create organizations and technologies that facilitate more equitable and sustainable social and economic relations. She engages with organization theory, economic sociology, science and technology studies, and media studies. She also holds a master’s degree in sociology and technology studies from Technische Universität Berlin.

Asma Zafar is an assistant professor of business strategy at Brock University in Canada. She earned a PhD in business administration at the University of Alberta, specializing in strategic management and organization. Her research looks at the interplay between institutional pressures and organizational responses to such pressures. Her work has been published in the Journal of Business Ethics, Research in the Sociology of Organizations, and other outlets.

Foreword: Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Research in the Sociology of Organizations (RSO) publishes cutting-edge empirical research and theoretical papers that seek to enhance our understanding of organizations and organizing as pervasive and fundamental aspects of society and economy. We seek provocative papers that push the frontiers of current conversations, that help to revive old ones, or that incubate and develop new perspectives. Given its successes in this regard, RSO has become an impactful and indispensable fount of knowledge for scholars interested in organizational phenomena and theories. RSO is indexed and ranks highly in Scopus/SCImago as well as in the Academic Journal Guide published by the Chartered Association of Business Schools.

As one of the most vibrant areas in the social sciences, the sociology of organizations engages a plurality of empirical and theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of the varied imperatives and challenges that these organizations and their organizers face. Of course, there is a diversity of formal and informal organizations – from for-profit entities to non-profits, state and public agencies, social enterprises, communal forms of organizing, non-governmental associations, trade associations, publicly traded, family owned and managed, private firms – the list goes on! Organizations, moreover, can vary dramatically in size from small entrepreneurial ventures to large multinational conglomerates to international governing bodies such as the United Nations.

Empirical topics addressed by Research in the Sociology of Organizations include: the formation, survival, and growth or organizations; collaboration and competition between organizations; the accumulation and management of resources and legitimacy; and how organizations or organizing efforts cope with a multitude of internal and external challenges and pressures. Particular interest is growing in the complexities of contemporary organizations as they cope with changing social expectations and as they seek to address societal problems related to corporate social responsibility, inequality, corruption and wrongdoing, and the challenge of new technologies. As a result, levels of analysis reach from the individual, to the organization, industry, community, and field, and even the nation-state or world society. Much research is multilevel and embraces both qualitative and quantitative forms of data.

Diverse theory is employed or constructed to enhance our understanding of these topics. While anchored in the discipline of sociology and the field of management, Research in the Sociology of Organizations also welcomes theoretical engagement that draws on other disciplinary conversations – such as those in political science or economics, as well as work from diverse philosophical traditions. RSO scholarship has helped push forward a plethora of theoretical conversations on institutions and institutional change, networks, practice, culture, power, inequality, social movements, categories, routines, organization design and change, configurational dynamics, and many other topics.

Each volume of Research in the Sociology of Organizations tends to be thematically focused on a particular empirical phenomenon (e.g., creative industries, multinational corporations, entrepreneurship) or theoretical conversation (e.g., institutional logics, actors and agency, microfoundations). The series publishes papers by junior as well as leading international scholars, and embraces diversity on all dimensions. If you are scholar interested in organizations or organizing, I hope you find Research in the Sociology of Organizations to be an invaluable resource as you develop your work.

Professor Michael Lounsbury

Series Editor, Research in the Sociology of Organizations

Canada Research Chair in Entrepreneurship & Innovation

University of Alberta